Take your next giant leap in research

The Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory is directed Natalya Kaganovich, PhD.

Work in our lab focuses on how the developing brain changes as it learns to merge different senses. In the absolute majority of cases, speech perception is multisensory – we not only hear speech sounds, but also see the moving face of a talker, which significantly improves our ability to understand speech, especially under noisy conditions. While adults are skilled integrators of auditory and visual speech cues, children are not. This ability develops surprisingly slowly, with some aspects of audiovisual processing not maturing until late adolescence. We also study differences in cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying audiovisual speech perception in children with typical development and in those who have difficulty acquiring language, such as children with developmental language disorder (DLD), also referred to as specific language impairment (SLI).

Our lab is equipped with a 32 channel Biosemi ERP Data Acquisition System, which allows us to collect brain’s electrical signals in response to various stimuli – such as sounds, images, and their combination. The event-related potentials (ERP) technique is a non-invasive method and can be safely and easily used with children and adults. It has an excellent temporal resolution and can be used to study a range of cognitive processes, including language, attention, and memory.